Citibank causes card cancellation to incur fees

[Bolt]

When closing a Citibank credit card, I see this window hidden among a wall of text after a few account closure confirmation windows.

You will get a window that says the following:
Please read the following carefully:
Any future payments and transfers (excluding recurring transactions) from your Credit Card Account will be cancelled.
If you or any additional cardholder (if applicable) have recurring card instructions set up with merchants, you will need to contact the merchants directly to cancel and update with new payment details as we usually cannot do this.
Your account will not be closed until you have paid any outstanding balance in full. This includes any pending transactions, interest, fees and charges. The total payout amount displayed on your account, if any, is applicable only if payment is made today and no further transactions are posted on your account after your account closure date.
If you have an outstanding balance owing, we will continue to send you statements until the balance is zero and there have been no transactions since your last Statement Period. Any balance will continue to attract interest, unless an interest free period applies and relevant fees will continue to be charged until your account is closed. You will continue to be responsible for any transactions until your account is closed.
If you have an Easi-Pay arrangement, this will be cancelled, except if the payment due date falls within the next two business days. It is your responsibility to ensure that you maintain your payment obligations to avoid or minimise any interest, fees and charges until your account balance is reduced to zero.
If you have any pending disputed transactions, these will need to be finalised before we can complete your account closure. You will be liable for any disputed transactions that are found to be valid transactions.
Some benefits you used to receive with your card will be forfeited upon account closure.
All cards attached to this account will be cancelled. Please destroy all cards associated with this account.
Once you close your account, we will not be able to reinstate it.
[ ] I confirm I have read and understood the above statements.

The item that I have put in red and bold isn't in red and bold on the actual web page. But, it would seem to me that if this is accurate, then it's a means to cause customers to incur unnecessary fees in closing their account.

Questions for the Australian Frequent Flyer community.
1. In your experience in closing a Citibank branded QANTAS frequent flyer credit card, did your automatic payment method stop working?
2. Did Citibank levy fees upon you for non-payment?
3. If they did levy fees upon you, did they waive them when questioned on it?

 

[N0mad]

i'm not following, you close your accounts before they are paid in full?

my process is, pay full outstanding balance, once account is down to $0, close. Never had an issue before and never incurred any additional fees by any bank, Citi included.

I also, never set up direct debits or auto payments either to avoid potential complications.

 

[Bolt]

you close your accounts before they are paid in full?

Yes. Exactly. I have setup autopayment, so I rely on that to pay the balance on the due date. This is useful as a set and forget mechanism. If you forget, or in this case, if you weren't paying attention and it's cancelled, you have to pay interest and late fees.

 

[Bolt]

Update: At the time of closing the account, I was unable to transfer the full balance due to Osko outage with Citibank. As such I decided to close it first while waiting for Osko to come back online. As soon as I closed it, the account disappeared from both online banking and mobile banking. The automatic payment stops too. If your Citibank Plus Account has been randomly disabled like mine has, you can't pay from that either. I guess I'll need to setup an automatic regular transfer to stop the account form becoming inactive. Your only option left is BPay. Also, you'll need to call Citibank to get the balance amount, as there will be no other way to see it.

I'm listing this so that others mayhave the benefit of this information.